Much evidence supports the hypothesis that hearing-impaired children construct phonological representations and access their mental lexicon like normal hearing children. The question addressed here is whether these children use their phonological code for speech production. Phonological encoding, which integrates auditory, visual, and proprioceptive information, also implies temporal information which should allow them to anticipate the temporal structure of their own speech. In an experiment, we analyzed relative timing and pauses in sentences read by profoundly deaf children and matched normal hearing children between 9;7 and 11;7 years of age. Overall, sentences uttered by deaf children did not present the metric patterns of the French language. However, short phonological words were correctly timed. These results suggest that phonological programming must be distinguished from either lexical competence or temporal deficit.